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More than 40 people traveled to Niagara Falls for the College and University Print Management Association of Canada (CUPMAC) conference in June.

THOUGH SOME major digital printing equipment vendors may have sat out this year's AIIM/On Demand Conference and Exposition in Philadelphia, all of the key bindery vendors were there, showing off their latest innovations. IPG spent time at all of their booths.

THE AIIM/On Demand Conference and Exposition is returning to IPG’s home town of Philadelphia next month, taking place April 20-22. Some 10,000 people are expected to attend the three-day show, with hundreds of vendors planning to exhibit. To whet your appetite, IPG asked some key vendors what they plan to showcase at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

At George Fox University, producing course packs has always required a lot of time spent manually punching and coil binding pages. A recent installation, however, is destined to change everything.

At Metro, the transit agency serving the St. Louis region, the five-employee in-house printing and mailing facility recently executed multiple, multi-faceted initiatives that have resulted in improved quality, increased efficiency and major cost savings. The in-plant has been supporting Metro for more than 20 years, producing platform schedules, training and employee documentation/manuals, forms, business cards and stationery, newsletters and board meeting materials, among other jobs. The facility also houses a full-service mail center. Both printing and mailing functions are considered part of Metro's Office Services department.

THOUGH PRINT 09 may have gotten off to a slow start, the crowds eventually showed up. And when they did, many of them headed right for the bindery equipment. Nowhere was that more true than at the Standard Finishing Systems exhibit, which was bustling with activity on the third day of the show, even as other booths appeared to be on siesta. Mark Hunt, director of marketing for Standard, thought he knew why.

IT STARTED in the parking lot. As he stepped out of his car one day, Greg Cooper, print shop manager for the city of Baltimore's Digital Document Division, happened to run into the city's IT director. They started talking about the checks and bills that IT was printing for the city on its Xerox 92C printers. Cooper told him, flat out, that his in-plant was better positioned to handle this work than IT, whose main focus was supposed to be computers and data.

PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. Eisenhower had a dream of developing a program that would promote international understanding and friendship. So in 1956, Eisenhower founded People to People, basing the organization on his idea that direct contact between ordinary citizens from different parts of the world can encourage cultural understanding and world peace. Eight U.S. Presidents have served as the honorary chairman of People to People International.

Dozens of in-plant managers came to Philadelphia recently for the On Demand Conference. Here's a brief glimpse of what they saw there.

“OUR PRIMARY focus really is color,” declares Dallas Johnson, from his office at the University of California-Riverside. “We’ve moved away from black and white. We saw that as sort of a dying market…still see it that way.” With 35 years of printing experience to guide him, Johnson thinks he has a pretty good idea where the industry is headed. So when the director of Service Enterprises decided to move his in-plant away from the “dying” monochrome market and into the more promising world of color printing, he did it in a big way.